why your hotel needs an in-house social media expert

When it comes to digital marketing services for hotels, it’s not often that we recommend it’s best to keep things in-house. The Hotel Marketer offers digital marketing services to a variety of hotels around Europe; why would we start suggesting that they manage one huge aspect of it (social media) themselves – surely that’s not good business?

The thing is, social media is one of the few exceptions to most digital marketing. It’s not something, at least in our opinion, that you should really outsource to anybody else; unless you’re 100% certain that they know your business inside out, and that they have a constant stream of communication with both businesses.

To us the point of social media from a business, or hotels, perspective is that it’s a constant stream of activity or buzz, something that can be worked on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In this regard it doesn’t really allow itself to be managed externally, no matter how talented the social media consultants are.

Training hotels for Social Media

One service that we do provide is that of social media training, and advice, for hotels. We can inform you about the latest practises and trends in social media, giving you recommendations on the best platforms to be involved with, to give you the best investment for your time. We realise that hotels simply don’t have the time to be active across every platform; there’s far too many for that. It’s best to be active on fewer networks, but to have a stronger presence, then to spread yourself too thinly. We can help with the social network profile setup and optimisation for those platforms we feel would work best with your hotel.

Offering advice on using social media; so the type of content to post, the best times to post it, tools that allow for automatic posting of material freeing up your valuable time, is all part of the service that we do offer in this exciting field of online marketing.

Training individual members of a hotel in the use of social media is something we can help with and is something we highly recommend. Having an internal member of staff, perhaps from the sales and marketing team, who is savvy in social media usage, can be a hugely valuable resource for your hotel. As they’re already situated in the hub of your hotels business, they’re in touch with many departments and so should be knowledgeable in all areas of the hotel – so they’d be brilliant ambassadors for you socially, should you give them free-reign on your hotels social channels.

Why you should keep social media management in-house

Although there are times when you will want advice and help when it comes to social media, overall we feel that as a hotel you should be giving somebody within your organisation the opportunity to manage and maintain your own social media channels. It gives a great opportunity to that chosen individual (or individuals; you may want more than one person to have access to the networks after all) and will actually save you an arm-and-leg when it comes to comparing costs from social media consultants. And after all why pay someone external to “tweet” about your hotel when they’re many miles away, and completely disconnected to your operations, when you have somebody who’s likely more than capable of the job sitting right inside your hotel.